СКОЛЪКО ЭТО СТОИТ? (How much is it?)

СКОЛЪКО ЭТО СТОИТ? (skolka eta sto-eet?)

• A litre of water - 18 roubles - 36p
• A bottle of Russian beer - 17.5 roubles - 35p
• A can of Coca Cola - 13 roubles - 26p
• A bottle of imported beer - 40 roubles - 80p
• Half a litre of vodka - 60 roubles - One pound twenty
• A packet of Russian cigarettes - 9 roubles - 18p
• A packet of Malboro cigarettes - 30 roubles - 60p
• A locally made ice cream - 5 roubles - 10p
• A hot dog - 10 roubles - 20p
• A packet of crisps - 10 roubles - 20p
• A small packet of peanuts - 7 roubles - 14p
• A packet of noodles - 3 roubles - 6p

(Prices displayed are currently offered at a kiosk in Perm and were correct at the time of going to press. Prices may vary from kiosk to kiosk. Prices were calculated using an exchange rate of 50 Russian roubles to 1 GBP)

Perm, Russia – 5828 miles from London (GMT + 6 hours)

fl
Peter pushing his bike in the heavy rain in Perm

Our final few days in Moscow were taken up with us desperately trying to extend the temporary import documents we were given for the bikes upon entering Russia. At present we must leave Russia on the 19th July 2006 otherwise the bikes will be in Russia illegally and we spent two days in Moscow trying to sort this out. This culminated in a visit to two government offices which resulted in nothing more than an afternoon sitting in a corridor being spoken to, in Russian, by a security guard. After three hours a severe looking babushka emerged from behind a door at the end of the corridor, advanced slowly and menacingly towards us, told us that there was nothing we could do and we had to leave Russia now and left us standing in the corridor clasping our bits of paper with the security guard still talking to us about goodness knows what. After this set back we felt had one final option left to us and that was to take the night train back to St Petersburg and to go back to the office we had already visited a few weeks before in a final last ditch attempt to extend the permit. We left with high hopes that St Petersburg would be able to help us as when we had spoken to them last they told us that all we needed was a stamp from a hotel saying that we were staying in Russia for the duration of our visa. This was the one thing we had successful obtained in Moscow and so we were cautiously optimistic as we boarded the night train.


Tom trying to dodge the ticket inspector on the train to St Petersburg

The next morning we arrived in St Petersburg bleary eyed and hungover after meeting some Russian business men on the train with whom we spent the greater part of the evening drinking vodka, toasting international friendship and singing Beatles songs. Upon arriving at the offices we were told that there was nothing they could do for us as we did not have the bikes here in St Petersburg and anyway the hotel stamp we had was for a Moscow hotel and it had to be a St Petersburg one. We were even taken to see the Director who sat in his own office behind an empty desk and who, after hearing our sob story, gave us the one word answer "No" dismissing us with a shake of his head. Heading back to Moscow in the evening we agreed to give up trying to get the permit extended and to simply pay the fine St Petersburg told us the customs people would make us pay when we attempted to leave the country. This does mean that our bikes are now here illegally, but at the moment we have given up caring.

We left Moscow on the 21st July 2006 somewhat late in the day it being nearly 3pm by the time we had sorted ourselves out and were on the road. A long ride on the M7 took us from Moscow to Russia’s third largest city (and historically its wealthiest, although we are not sure this is still the case) of Nizhny Novgorod. Our late departure from Moscow and the fact that the roads, while in good condition, were chock full of articulated lorries meant that we did not arrive in Nizhny Novgorod until late in the evening. Although we arrived late we were lucky and found a hotel quickly. The hotel we did find was massive - a fact I found strange given that Nizhny Novgorod, while big, was no where near as large as places like Moscow and St Petersburg and could hardly be expected to attract anywhere near the same number of visitors. A night in one of their un-renovated (and therefore cheaper) rooms was much needed and passed without incident other than the door handle to the room falling off whenever we tried to lock the door. The next morning a quick ride around the city centre took us to the 17th Century Kremlin where we watched a couple having wedding photos taken next to, rather oddly, the war memorial and a Russian Second World War battle tank and then we went to Maxim Gorky’s house. Gorky was born and lived in this city (which was actually called Gorky during the Soviet era) and the local authorities have preserved the house in which he apparantly spent the first twenty-five years of his life. Despite it appearing to be closed we were ushered in by the security guard and introduced to the Director who allocated us a tour guide.


Peter making friends with the Director and tour guide at Gorky's house (more pictures of Gorky's House on Tom's photo page)

The guide, an elderly lady who spoke not a word of English, gave us a long tour of the building telling us reams of information about Gorky’s life and the history of the place as we walked from room to room. Given our meagre Russian language skills we understood nothing of what she said and, despite us telling her that, she just kept on going with the thinking presumably being that since we had paid our money we would get the full tour no matter what.
The road from Nizhny Novgorod to Kazan was as full of lorries as we had come to expect of Russian roads and despite it only being just under three hundred miles it took us a good six hours with the result that we arrived late in the evening again. Despite this we still found a hotel with ease simply by riding around the city centre until we saw largest and ugliest behemoth of a building which we were starting to learn was inevitably a Soviet built hotel. Kazan kept us for no time at all and we left there first thing in the morning intending to get to Perm that day. In the end we made it as far as Izhevsk and so a night there in yet again another un-renovated room in a concrete block of a hotel left gave us a break and left us sort of ready for the ride to Perm.


A lorry which ran into a few difficulties on the road to Perm

Since the motorbikes are now in Russia illegally we are understandably reluctant to spend too long here and this is why we have been heading to the Kazak border at as fast a pace as we can manage. Notwithstanding this we still want to see as much of Russia as we can and so upon leaving Moscow our intention had been to spend a minimum of one night in a place unless there was a real reason to spend longer there. Until we got to Perm our plan had been to spend more than one night in Yekaterinaburg only to give ourselves a break as the ride from Moscow was starting to take a toll on us (when we got to Perm we had ridden 1000 miles in four days); however, when we got to Perm all this went out of the window.


Perm in all it's industrial beauty and in those heady days when Peter's front tyre was still intact

As we pulled into the city in the pouring rain and after a long day riding on some of the worst roads we had seen so far my bike hit a manhole which, for some unknown reason, had had the manhole cover removed. This burst my front tyre and meant that I had to push the bike the remaining hundred or so yards to the hotel. We are now stuck here in Perm until I can get the tyre replaced or repaired. Luckily there is a BMW dealer in town, although when I spoke with them yesterday I was told that, after they had spoken to BMW in Moscow, they can confirm that there are no tyres in Russia which will fit my bike. New tires will have to ordered from the manufacturer in Germany and that will take in the region of two to three weeks. So here we are in Perm a large industrial city with nothing at all here other than an art gallery and museum which the guide book tells us has the largest religious icon collection in Russia. When we manage to get my bike tyre sorted out we will be heading east and in one hundred and fifty miles will be crossing the Europe/Asia border and entering Siberia. Since we will have to hot foot it the Kazak border we probably won't have any more time for postings until we get to Almaty in hopefully a few weeks time. So watch this space ...

Written by Peter

A view of Nizhniy Novgorod from the Kremlin (left); the road to perm (right)

Moscow, Russia - 4827 miles from London

St Basil's, the view from Red Square (the classic Moscow picture)
To travel from St Petersburg to Moscow The Lonely Planet recommends making the 400 mile or so journey in a berth on the night train. Instead, you could do as we did and take the more interesting route by driving the M10 which connects Russia's two major cities. The majority of vehicles are trucks and, whilst short stretches of the road are smooth dual carriageway, much of it is pot holed and rutted tarmac, often with no road markings even to distinguish what side of the road you are on. When there is something resembling a hard shoulder it is usually made of sand which is used to help to bring to a standstill trucks that have burst a worn down tire. Towns on this road don't have by-passes so you will find yourself passing straight through the middle them on what is their high street. After a while you get an instinct for where the next police speed trap will be and whether a town will have a check point on one side of it or not and once you have got used to the high speed overtaking and undertaking (usually by 4 x 4s undoubtedly owned by Russia's nouveau riche) and what it is really like to be stuck in a rut by driving in one you can relax a little and start to take in a bit of the culture of the road. It is quite an experience. You might see, as I did, gravestones by the roadside, truck drivers taking a dip in a river with their wives or lady friends (they quite often seem to travel with company), families stopped in the hard shoulder having BBQs, locals dotted along the route selling a single jar of locally picked berries or stalls with fun fair style cuddly toys and towels with pictures of lorries printed on them, town houses literally on the side of the road collapsing into themselves, truck drivers stopping to help fellow drivers change a wheel and farmers making hay. To break up the journey you could spend the night as we did in the Hotel Tver. Don't be deceived by the fact that the roof is half built, it is a half decent hotel as long as it's not raining, but do watch out for the gigantic horse flies outside. Their bite is apparently pretty painful.


Leaving St. Petersburg as the hotel filled up with journalists covering the G8. Picture of me with the security guard who we paid too much to watch over our bikes
One of the high speed overtakes we experienced was made by a Slovakian biker couple who waved to us as they passed (as all bikers do as they pass). We later met them outside the Hotel Tver and then again in Moscow after recommending them a hostel we had found. It was good to exchange stories of the road with Branco and Natasha and to relieve the monotony of our own company that we were beginning to experience.

Branco and Natasha
Using the Sherstone Hostel as a base in Moscow we are seeing what tourists typically see in Moscow and finding that the city has much less to offer sight hungry tourists (which we do not class ourselves as) than St Petersburg. This is a much more gritty hard working city, noticeably less style conscious and with a good deal of the utilitarian style architecture that you would expect to see in Russia. In the quest to extend the import permits for the bikes we are experiencing far too much of the frustration caused by Russian bureaucracy which also is heightened by the fact that we only speak a few words of Russian and almost no-one speaks English here. If we don't extend our permits we are required to leave the country with the bikes this Thursday which, given the distance to Kazakhstan, is now impossible. More on this to follow...

The bikes at BMW in Moscow. On the left, Dennis, the service manager. We were treated very wel here and told that only four people touring had passed through their gates for a service this year.
I will finish this entry with a thought I have just had about our trip and the Metro system in both St. Petersburg and Moscow. It is not just my inability to transcribe cyrillic with any speed or accuracy but, you just need to take my word for the fact that they are both extremely badly signed and there are very few maps on either of the transit systems. One reason for this must be because it wasn't long ago that very few people who were not native to these cities traveled on these trains and these frequent travelers always knew where they were going. In 2006 as we are finding, albeit with quite a bit of effort, two guys from England are able to enter the country and ride around relatively freely on their own motorbikes.

The Moscow Metro, which apparently is used by more people every day than together use the London Underground and the New York Subway.

Written by Tom

St Petersburg, Russia - 4452 miles from London

We have finally made it into Russia. After four and a half exhausting hours at the border attempting to take on Russian bureaucracy one to one we retreated defeated and spent and acquiesced to the every officials wish for this and that document to be completed and filled out. After giving two copies of this form to the young woman in the first cabin, a payment of 100 Roubles to the woman in the bank (after we had killed one and a half hours waiting for her to finish her evening break), another two forms to the man in the next cabin along and the final scrap of paper to the soldier who was supposed to check our bikes we were free to go.


The Russian border crossing

Despite all this the whole thing was no where near as bad as we had feared it would be. The customs never even took a close look at our bikes, no-one asked Tom about is GPS and it would appear that no-one seemed to have an issue with the missing stamp that worried us so much in Lappenranta. Of course something had to go wrong and other than the bank closing for an hour and a half just as we were about to pay our 100 Roubles to the woman there the only slight hitch was that we have only been granted a two week import permit for the bikes to come into Russia. Although our visa says that we are allowed to stay in Russia until the middle of August the import certificate we have been given says that the bikes can only stay until the 19th July 2006. No matter as we have been given, by the customs man, a telephone number and address of someone in St Petersburg who will be able to help us; so that’s alright then!
We arrived in St Petersburg just after midnight and, despite all the previous good intentions we had had of booking a hotel in St Petersburg well in advance of our arrival, we have still not managed to sort anything out. One am therefore saw us sitting in a café somewhere in St Petersburg calling hotels and finding out that each was full and had no space at all. While I was on the phone to the hotels Tom was trying to work what on earth was in the seemingly totally solid hot chocolate drink he had ordered while at the same time trying to ignore the blind drunk Russian guys sitting at a table outside the café and alternately dancing, laughing and plastering themselves against the window in an attempt to get Tom’s attention. We didn’t stay there long as we shortly thereafter found a reasonable hotel and hotfooted it to there leaving solid hot chocolate and drunk Russians behind us.


St Petersburg kids cooling off in the heatwave

St Petersburg has so far proved to be a beautiful and fascinating city. The River Neva is flanked on both sides by Baroque houses painted a multitide of colours and all in good condition while The Hermitage has a huge collection of paintings and other art works which we all housed in the spectacular Winter Palace and which we in our four and a half hours there barely managed to see.


Photo of the St Petersburg Metro taken shortly before we were fined for taking pictures on the Metro

One of the most intriguing sights we have seen so far in St Petersburg has been the predominance of elderly ladies. They crop up in all manner of places, The Hemitage, the Metro, shops, hotels, on the streets and loitering in and around apartments.


Babuska's guard The Hermitage

We have seen precious little though in the way of elderly men and can only wonder whether this is because the women are particularly strong and enduring or whether the men drink themselves into an early grave. Certainly we have seen far more in the way of public drinking here than in anywhere else we have been to so far – everywhere we look we see both men and women walking around with cans and bottles of beer and occasionally bottles of vodka or other spirits.

Written by Peter

We have both bought Russian SIM cards our mobiles. Our numbers are:

Peter: +7 9500 145385

Tom: +7 9500 145489

If you do want to call us, perhaps send a text and arrange a time for the call. Remember to check with whoever pays the bill before call! Call charges from the UK to Russian mobile numbers are likely to be exepensive.

Lappeenranta, Finnish border town - 4200 miles from London

We plan to cross into Russia today at a border point about 30 miles southeast of Lappeenranta. Bureaucratic problems are already upon us. When we bought our third party Russian bike insurance this morning we were told that we do not have the necessary stamp on our visas to enter the country with the motorbikes. We went to the Russian consulate in town and they said that this is not a problem; however, the chap we spoke to then went on to say that we should not mention the abscence of the stamp to the border guards and that he wished us luck in trying to get across the border. Somehow this does not fill us with confidence ...


The Puijo Radio Tower, Finland. The radio waves from the tower jammed the signal from Peter's alarm remote. We had to push the bike down the hill away from the tower with the alarm going off to get it far enough away from the tower to disable the alarm. Apparantly this is a known fault with Datatool bike alarms. Think twice before buying one, particularly if you live near a radio tower!

The view from the radio tower

Camping in Koupori, Finland (left); the Sauana and the lake at the campsite (right).

Oulu, Finland (south of the Arctic Circle) 3820 miles from London

Oulu
We crossed the deserted border into Finland from Norway in the rain just after midnight last Monday and went straight to a campsite about 500 metres away. I had noticed that an unusually large number of insects had been hitting my helmet visor for the last 60 miles or so and should have realised from the stories I had heard about northern Finland that I was riding through swarms of mosquitoes. It was hard work putting the tent up which was made a little easier by wearing a head mosquito net given to me as a leaving present at work and the fact that it wasn’t in the least bit dark.

Putting up the tent at 12.30am

In the morning we left as soon as the rain stopped and headed along long straight fast roads (unlike many of the roads in Norway) through monotonous wooded countryside and past reindeer to the town of Rovaniemi, the capital of Lapland, about 260 miles to the south. We had once again crossed the arctic circle which runs slightly to the north of the town and upon which Santa Claus lives. We went back to meet him at Santa Claus Village where the official arctic circle marker and Santa's post office, which receives over a million letters a year, is located. He was extremely personable and much more charismatic that the lookalikes I had encountered as a child. He promised to bring me world peace even if I was in India where they don't have chimneys.

On the ride to Rovaniemi (left); Santa's Office (right)

I imagine is strictly against the rules but very good of him. Peter and I also got talking to one of his elves, who was a normal sized woman called Sini. The whole experience was pretty surreal and made more so when we later bumped into Sini outside our hotel in the early hours of the morning (in bright sunlight!) and she invited us to her friend's flat. We gratefully accepted and we were treated by Sini and her friend Leena to a variety of different types of alcohol and an interesting insight into local life. It was really good talking with Sini and Leena and it a good example of how friendly and welcoming we have found the people in Norway and Finland to be.

Drinks in Leena's flat

The next morning we left the town where it is Christmas every day and which was built in the shape of reindeer antlers after its complete destruction by the Germans in 1944 and once again headed south, this time for the town of Oulu on the coast of the Gulf of Bothnia. We booked into the Radisson hotel which, for what it is was extremely modestly priced. We have been in Oulu for a few days now, relaxing, making use of the pool and the sauna and taking a deep breath and preparing to cross the border into Russia. We realise that this is probably the last of the easy life and that things will probably get pretty tricky from Russia onwards. Despite the proximity we have found that very few Finnish people that we have met have been to Russia and most we have spoken to don't have a good word to say about the country. Given their history with Russia we have tried not to give to much credence to some of the extreme stories we have heard.

The Radisson Hotel and the view from our hotel window
The guide book we have doesn't really do justice to Oulu but I suppose if you are on a short visit to the region the lack of tourist “attractions” that the town has may be a factor in deciding to visit Oulu or not. That said we are really enjoying it here. The weather is perfect, with clear blue skies and a slight breeze and there is a pretty nice beach that a local told us was the northern most beach in Europe. The harbour front bars are full and the town is lively and friendly in the sunshine. It is dificult to imagine what it is like here in the winter when we are told that the atmosphere is totally different and many people get very depressed in the darkness months. We have hired bicycles and have joined in with the local cycling culture. Crime here is so low that people don't really bother to lock their bikes up. Here are some facts about Finland:
Approximately 70% of Finland is covered with forest, the highest proportion in the world;
There are 187,888 lakes in Finland;
Nokia is a company founded in Finland in the town of Nokia which is on the banks of the Emäkoski River in the region of Pirkanmaa and the province of Western Finland. According to Wikipedia "nokia" is short for nokinäätä which apparantly means "sable". A sable is a small mammal, closely akin to the martens, living in northern Asia and used to live in European Russia and Scandinavia;
Finland used to be an expensive country like Norway but now and from our experience it is not very different to Britain;
29% of Fins think that immigrants should go back to their countries of origin;
25% of young men consider themselves somewhat supportive of the skinhead and anti-immigrant activities in Finland
Things may be improving. In 1993 61% of the population had negative attitudes towards accepting foreign workers compared to 38% in 2003.
(Racism statistics are from a English langauage magazine I was reading called SixDegrees - the next day we saw a man dressed in WWII Nazi uniform driving around the main square in Oulu in a vintage American car, playing Nazi marching music and giving the Hitler salute).

Written by Tom